SCHiM review

Having all these different (and often slightly ridiculous sounding) genres in video games can be great for categorising new titles in a review setting, but sometimes a game just doesn’t fit neatly into one box. SCHiM is absolutely one of these games. The main thing you’ll be doing is jumping from one shadow to another, but there’s not really a challenge in doing so that makes the game feel like a platformer. Sometimes you’ll need to interact with objects to open up the path to the end of a stage, but to call it a puzzle game is a bit of a stretch. There’s a story about a guy losing his little shadow frog and his life going downhill because of this, but the lack of focus on this makes it hard to call a narrative game. After seeing the credits I’m still none the wiser as to what the main appeal or hook of SCHiM really is, but I suppose I enjoyed my time with it for the most part.

In SCHiM you play as, well, a SCHiM. A SCHiM is a little invisible frog creature that lives in a shadow, and is sort of like the soul of that object. Without a SCHiM an object loses its very essence, so when that happens to a guy after an intro shows him growing up, riding bikes, and graduating school, his life is thrown into disarray (though it largely results in him walking around slumped over). As the lost SCHiM in question it’s up to you to get back to your shadow, by hopping between other shadows.

Each stage of SCHiM has a goal to reach (generally a person or vehicle which will be heading towards your missing person) and it’s your job to hop to it. This means finding a path of shadows where you can survive, and more than a couple of seconds on the ground outside of a shadow is fatal for a SCHiM. You’ll jump from lamppost to bollard without a care in the world in the first few stages, but before you know it the pace will pick up with people, bikes, and cars passing each other by and creating a network of moving paths to the goal.

It won’t take long for the path to the finish of a stage to become unclear, and you’ll need to hit the shoulder buttons to rotate the camera 90 degrees. Exploring the world around you is the only way you’ll make it back to your person, but it’s rarely that difficult to tell where to go next. You can’t even lose your bearings because a simple hold of one of the triggers points the camera towards your goal, so no amount of spinning will disrupt your quest.

Sometimes to get to the end of a level you’ll need to interact with the objects you’re in the shadow of. With the push of a button you’ll be able to lower a barricade which gives you a longer shadow to your destination, for example, or you can pull a sign back to catapult yourself across a road, or turn on a lamp in a night time stage to reveal a whole new load of shadows to jump into. If you’re stumped it’s always a good idea to mess about with the environment and see if something fixes the problem.

But really that’s all you need to know about SCHiM. The stages of the game, while all themed differently, generally involve the same hopping from A-to-B. Some stages also include a few hidden items to find for completionists (which don’t seem to serve a purpose) but that’s all you’ll do until the credits hit. I found myself compelled to keep jumping through the stages for most of the fairly short game, but towards the end the slightly tedious repetition started to wear on me.

There is one aspect of SCHiM that’s almost undeniably great though, and that’s the visuals. The simple single colour aesthetic when combined with all the shadows and silhouettes of the world never ceases to impress, and the changing of the colour scheme between stages makes each of them look rather unique and gives them a different mood.

SCHiM is a beautiful and intriguing game, but one that after an hour or so has already shown its full hand. Never quite committing to being a tricky platformer or an engaging puzzle game, SCHiM ends up being a slow paced experience that just sort of chugs along until the credits. Some still might get a kick out of the uniqueness of this odd little frog hopping adventure though, and they’ll be treated to some gorgeous visuals if they do.